


Under Night Morning After

by AkerSama



Category: Under Night In-Birth (Video Game)
Genre: Backstory, Drabble Collection, Drama, Gen, Humor, What-If
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-29
Updated: 2018-10-29
Packaged: 2019-08-09 18:58:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16455494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AkerSama/pseuds/AkerSama
Summary: Tales of the past, present, and future, of men you know and those you've never met. These are the stories that never left the Hollow Night. A series of drabbles and short stories about the world and cast of Under Night In-Birth.





	Under Night Morning After

The daily grind of high school life isn’t for everyone. Least of all me. I do the bare minimum to get by, I go home, I sleep. Repeat day-in and day-out. It’s a never-ending game with no deadline. This is the way it is, has been, and will continue to be. Like hell it will. I know that these days won’t last forever. This is my last year in this dump, and I haven’t even begun thinking about what comes next for me. Don’t need to. I already know that I’m not meant for success. Today’s society’s definition of it, anyway. Go to college, get a steady job, tie the knot with some lady, have kids. That’s what they expect from me. No one ever saw some single dude stuck with a gas station job in a crappy apartment and thought, “That guy has his life figured out.” They’re wrong about me though. I know I’ll never achieve anything better. I’m the trash of society, and this is where I’ll rot until I waste away. Who knows, maybe it was my destiny from the start to be food for the earth. Good. That’s where I belong anyway.

There is one singular thing that I’ve got a knack for. A thing that I can take full confidence in. A thing where I actually feel alive. And that thing is fighting. The people in this shithole of a town have alot of pent-up aggression, and they love to take it out on random strangers. Not that I’m any different, of course. It wasn’t always this way for me, though. It was way back in junior high when this passion of mine came to be. I was just on my way home from yet another uneventful day of school when two punks stopped me under the bridge. I still remember their rugged, bandaged faces, their filthy, tattered uniforms, and their ridiculous hair that made you wonder if they put more liquid in there than down their throats. I could tell that they were high schoolers, but here they were ganging up on some guy three years their junior. It pissed me off. It really pissed me the fuck off. Before I even realized what I was doing, one guy’s face was driven into the road, and the other was getting their ribs crushed between the walls and my fists. Bloody noses, bruised faces, and scraped limbs aplenty that day, and I kept going no matter how much they kept getting up or begging me to stop. It felt good. In all of my miserable life, I’d never felt so much adrenaline rushing through me, like a red-hatted plumber grabbing a sparkling star. Not the deepest of similes, I know, but what kinda garbage did you expect me to spew out? I finally felt good about something. Very, very good. I never felt the same way as I did when I was hammering away at those two morons.

I knew I needed more.

By cleaning up some street trash, I wound up turning into one myself. But why fight it? I’ve take little joy in anything else. This is what I live for now. To hang around the streets, finding people to let out all my steam on, and leave their bodies and spirits broken. The rush that comes from staring into the battered and bloodied and watching the hope in their eyes die as they realize how weak they are. Oh yes, I live for that moment. I love going after the ones who like to talk big and act like they’re above the rest of us. There’s always satisfaction in putting the smug and conceited in their place, and you can’t pretend that doesn’t feel good to you too. This was my life for three years. Sometimes I walked away with another face in the pavement, sometimes I woke up in an infirmary, sometimes someone knew when to fold them and ran, and sometimes that someone was me. I didn’t think beating the shit out of people could get any more thrilling. That’s when I met him. 

He had some friends that I recently threw to the trash heap, and they went crying to him when they finally managed to crawl out. What was very interesting about him was that he had this unique little trick, like one of those superpowers out of a comic book. He could shoot these beams out of his hands, and I could tell at the first shot that they weren’t just cheap parlor tricks. At first I thought I was just having a dream, I had a hard time believing what I was seeing. But after getting over my initial surprise, he turned out to be no better than the usual wannabe-tough guy that usually throws themselves at me. All the neat gimmicks in the world mean nothing if you’ve got no clue how to use them. From then on, the fight was little different from most of my others. Duck and weave, block and return, find every weak point and strike hard and fast. Soon, he was just another ruined face. But I wasn’t done with him yet, oh no. His laser beams made me plenty curious. And as they say, the curious mind wanders. I made him spill the beans about where he got the ability to do that from. All I got in return was this incomprehensible talk about something called the Hollow Night, and EXS, and Voids and all this game terminology bullshit. I thought he was fucking with me, so boom, I smashed back into the road and took off.

Later I found out that he wasn’t the only one in on this. All across the school and throughout the town I kept listening in on the same rumors about this so-called “Hollow Night”, hearing the same thing every time. What he told me was actually starting to stick with me. I needed to figure out how to get involved in this Night. So, I singled out a kid at my school who was spreading the rumors and caught him alone, ready to take my sweet time beating the guy down until he talked. To my surprise, and may I say, disappointment, he was ready to talk right away without me even having to raise a fist. Apparently, there was this event that went on every full moon, and getting bit by these things called “Void” that appear during this event is what lets me get powers like what that other punk had. It was worth a shot, I had heard enough for enough different people to think it worth looking into.

To get a little more excitement in my miserable life, I was ready to give it up trying.

(To be Continued.)


End file.
